Login

Over the past 12 years, Google has done its best to keep the black sailed marauders of the SEO world from taking over their search engine with bad links from junky websites. Google works hard to ensure that their algorithms continue to make these black-hat SEO practitioners stay in the dark. While they make minor changes yearly, every so often the search engine behemoth makes a major update that heavily affects SEO. Two of the recent updates are the animalistic algorithms of Google’s not-so-cuddly Panda, and slippery Penguin shakeups.

Panda was a major algorithm change that looked to crush quality issues related to content farms and sites with little content or high ad-to-content ratios. This update affected nearly 12 percent of all search results across the interwebs. There have been quite a few updates made to Panda already, but rank fluctuations show that 3.7 was the most powerful, and affected the largest amount of searches since its inception.

In April of 2012, Google introduced its spam annihilating Penguin to the scene. Penguin was designed to be a major spam algorithm change, and looked to adjust spam factors, including keyword stuffing and cloaking. Sites are now being punished by Google for using negative black-hat SEO tactics as opposed to white-hat tactics. For people who own websites, it can be a good idea to do a quick double check to make sure Penguin hasn’t affected their traffic and site rank negatively on accident — computers still can’t discern like humans. There’s also some helpful tips at the bottom of this graphic to help survive any negative impact from Penguin.